Hamm, of course, is the Emmy-nominated star of the critically lauded TV drama Mad Men, which wraps its current season Sunday on AMC.

Dark and mysterious, his brooding ad exec Don Draper personifies a generation of middle-aged martini guzzlers cast adrift when the swinging ’60s tuned in, turned on and made everyone over 30 reach for their headache tablets.

He’s Gary Cooper meets Jimmy Stewart, an old-fashioned charmer with a taciturn, mid-century authority that has turned Mad Men into the TV equivalent of fine wine or a stately Victorian novel. Classic.

And yet, here he is, inexplicably, in a Disney film about a troubled sports agent who recruits two unknowns from the dusty streets of Mumbai, turns them into world-class pitchers and finds redemption.

Honestly, it’s not a bad film, though the reviews have been lacklustre and it opened to a collective yawn at the box office.

And as I sat in the half empty theatre watching it last weekend, I wondered how it could possibly have come to this.

How could one of TV’s great actors — which Hamm undoubtedly is — be relegated to the same workplace humiliation his TV counterpart experiences every week on Mad Men?

He’s not the first celebrated thespian to find his talents underappreciated in the land of broken dreams.

Morgan Freeman, acclaimed Oscar winner, appeared in The Lego Movie, for crying out loud.

Sally Field popped up in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Ben Kingsley in Iron Man 3 and the great Robert De Niro in — hold your nose — Little Fockers.

But those are acting vets who had their payday 20, 30 years ago. They’re content to coast.

Hamm represents a new generation: esteemed niche actors who make a bid for Hollywood stardom but, for reasons large and small, end up face-planting on the pavement.

Call it the Great Hollywood Screen Swindle.

“The last thing I wanted to do was play another womanizer or ladies man or Lothario,” the 43-year-old actor defiantly told Vanity Fair. “I’ve taken myself out of the running for a lot of those parts, because it’s just more of the same.”

And yet there he is in Million Dollar Arm, playing Don Draper lite, a disgruntled workaholic womanizer described by critic Andrew O’Hehir as a “cynical sports-agent protagonist, played by Don Draper, I mean by Jon Hamm.”

I’m not blaming Hamm. He takes what he can get.

Lupita Nyong’o — who won an Oscar for 12 Years a Slave but doesn’t fit established Hollywood prototypes — is in final talks for her next project as, get this, the voice of the mother wolf in an animated remake of Disney’s The Jungle Book.

Bryan Cranston — a TV actor who cornered the market on cool during five critically hailed seasons on Breaking Bad — is playing opposite neither Tom Cruise or Sandra Bullock, but a giant rubber monster in the special effects blockbuster Godzilla.

James Gandolfini — Tony Soprano on HBO masterwork The Sopranos — fared a bit better, finding posthumous success as a lovable schlub in the relationship drama Enough Said after years of post-gangster supporting roles.

But bona fide movie stardom?

That’s for people like Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, Will Smith, Leonardo DiCaprio and James Franco, laid-back showboats with easygoing charm and likability through the roof.

Hamm? He’s an actor of subtlety and nuance, a precisioned craftsman who says more with a cocked eyebrow or resigned shrug than most Hollywood peers convey in a 20-page soliloquy.

“He appears to be this handsome guy without a trouble in the world, but he is not,” notes movie director Mike Nichols. “I think he fits right in with Gary Cooper and Robert Taylor and Montgomery Clift. I think he’s a movie hero.”

Don’t tell Hollywood. They think he’s a bit player who can be shunted from one make-work project to the next, like a doctor who comes over from India and can only find work as a cab driver.

Do you know what his next movie project is? The voice of a cartoon villain in the Despicable Me sequel, Minions.

So what’s the deal?

TV and film are different mediums.

TV is intimate. Films, at least of the Hollywood variety, are larger than life. Hamm, who oozes subtlety, sophistication and looks like somebody’s dad, isn’t the guy anyone’s going to pick as the next Spider-Man or Captain America.

It’s about the bottom line.

I was going to say there’s a double standard, an institutional snobbery that places film actors on a higher cultural plane, but that’s no longer the case. The dividing line today is audience share. And while prestigious cable dramas like Mad Men and Breaking Bad have surpassed Hollywood films in quality, they command tiny viewerships that make Hollywood suits jittery. The end result: Zac Efron, George Clooney and Jennifer Aniston, who leapfrogged from network hits, are movie stars. Hamm, Cranston and Gandolfini are not.

Why buy the cow when you can get the milk free?

It’s simple metrics: if you watch Mad Men on AMC, it’s included in your cable bill. Why pay $10.99 extra to watch Hamm do the same thing on the big screen, but not as well? In the end, it comes down to optics, image and return on the dollar. Bigger is better. Less is more. Youth is king. Comedy trumps drama. Talent is relative.

Hamm’s challenge — and it’s a big one — is to convince Hollywood suits to give a forty-something TV actor who deals in drama, subtlety and doesn’t mince for the camera a shot at the big time.

Likelihood? The same as Rob Ford emerging from rehab a changed man or a giant lizard stomping on Tokyo.

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